1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an information transmission system and an information transmission method suitable for a small-sized communication terminal such as a portable phone, and more particularly, to an information transmission system and an information transmission method capable of performing an easy input operation.
2. Description of the Related Art
Small-sized communication terminals including portable phone, PHS (Personal Handy-phone System), and PDA (Personal Digital Assistant) are in wide use for a private purpose and a business purpose. Especially, many of these communication terminals are respectively provided with a function of transmitting and receiving electronic mail.
The electronic mail requires input of body text and destination as the text information. The small-sized communication terminal has a few keys (buttons) on the data input portion because of its limited space of key arrangement. For example, in a portable phone, an input keyboard serves both as keys for entering text information and numeric keys for entering dial information. A user has to operate a plurality of keys as for one character when entering text in many cases, which makes the input work troublesome.
Then, a first proposal is made in which a voice corresponding to the contents of mail is entered from a portable phone, this is converted into the text information by a special voice recognition device connected to a communication network such as the Internet, and the information is stored into its storage as mail data (for example, refer to Japanese Patent Publication Laid-Open (Kokai) No. 2001-211265 (paragraphs 0017 and 0022, FIGS. 3 and 6)).
FIG. 16 shows the outline of a communication system according to the first proposal. A telephone terminal 101 is connected to a host 103 through a base station 102. The host 103 is connected to a voice recognition device 105 through the Internet 104. A voice recognition program is installed into the voice recognition device 105. A storage 106 is connected to the voice recognition device 105.
In the communication system 100 of the first proposal, when transmitting mail of text format from the telephone terminal 101, a user at first enters mail address and the like through a predetermined input operation, then enters the contents that should be the text mail, with voice, and transmits this to the voice recognition device 105 as voice mail. When receiving the voice mail on the side of the voice recognition device 105, the voice corresponding to the contents is converted into the text information and returned to the telephone terminal 101. A user modifies the text information received by the telephone terminal 101 depending on necessity and transmits this to the destination of the mail. In short, the telephone terminal 101 transmits the voice information of the mail body text to the voice recognition device 105 through the Internet 104, converts this voice information into the text information, and returns it. The telephone terminal 101 can modify the obtained text information properly and transmit it to the destination of the mail.
In this communication system 100 of the first proposal, when a user modifies the text information transmitted as the recognition result from the voice recognition device 105 to the telephone terminal 101, he or she has to do this through the operation of keys on the telephone terminal 101 itself. Therefore, the work of modifying a conversion mistake or partly rewriting the sentence itself is as troublesome and time-consuming as ever.
Then, a second proposal for making easy a whole text input operation of a user's portable terminal is made (for example, refer to Japanese Patent Publication Laid-Open (Kokai) No. 2003-46652 (paragraphs 0028 to 0030 and FIG. 3)).
FIG. 17 shows an important portion of a communication system according to the second proposal. In this communication system 120, a portable terminal 121 is connected to a voice recognition device 123 through a base station 122. When the portable terminal 121 enters the voice and transmits this to the voice recognition device 123 in order to create mail, the voice recognition device 123 converts this into the text information. The converted text information is transmitted from the voice recognition device 123 to a WWW (World Wide Web) server 125 on the Internet 124. The WWW server 125 displays this on a Web in a web description language.
The portable terminal 121 browses the text information in the web description language, which has been created by the WWW server 125, through access to the Internet 124. Modification of the text information is performed on the Web by using a radio button, not illustrated. Therefore, the modification work becomes easier.
As mentioned above, a way of saving the operation work by converting the voice information into the text information and then transmitting it as electronic mail, has been hitherto generally performed. Especially in the field of the portable phones, it is frequent practice to create mail body text having text information such as letter and character combined with pictogram. Use of the pictogram facilitates understanding of the transmission contents of electronic mail or the mood of a transmitting person. In order to create this body text including the pictogram, it is necessary to select some pictogram and enter the pictogram into the text information, and in this case, the processing of entering each pictogram individually through key operation has been required hitherto.
Although it is possible to enter text corresponding to the reading of a voice, since the pictogram is not a phonogram, there is no method of entering the pictogram in the text information. In order to enter a pictogram, it is necessary to specify a position to enter the pictogram in a sentence through the conventional key operation and specify the code information or display a list screen of the pictograms hence to specify and enter a desired pictogram individually. Accordingly, there still remains such a problem that operationality cannot be much improved on the whole because the pictogram cannot be entered with voice even though general text information can be entered easily through voice input and kana conversion of the voice analyzed.